This current HBO documentary is a clever patchwork of well-chosen film clips and interviews with an array of participants regarding the scandal of thirty years ago. In the end, it’s unsatisfying, but it does bring one back to the body of Polanski’s work and asks you to think about them in a new way. And maybe every documentary is unsatisfying in the same way in that, more than fiction films, more than abstract film, they seem cooked up and edited to fill a certain agenda.

Born in France, the son of a Polish Jew, Polanski was 4 when his parents took him back to Poland in 1937 just in time for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Polanski escaped from the Krakow ghetto but his mother died in Auschwitz, while his father spent the war a prisoner in another concentration camp. Roman lived on a farm, doing the foulest sort of farm work for an elderly man (who kicked his dupa on a daily basis). After WWII he grew up in a Cold-War Poland of deprival and communist-mandated order. When the Sixties rolled around, Polanski found himself, through a bizarre chain of circumstances and film school luck, making a trio of English-language films in the swinging London of Twiggy, the Beatles, Tony Conrad and Mary Quant. And he did what any one of us might have done—went overboard with the excess. Like a rubber duck in a swirling bathtub, he wobbled among languages and among opposing worldviews and somehow always managed to keep smiling, even while making the supremely sinister and just plain nasty Repulsion, his 1965 thriller starring Catherine Deneuve. American audiences took to Repulsion in a limited way, though it seemed a strange vulgarization of the austere themes of Knife in the Water (1962), his first international breakthrough—and ninth Polish film. There’s something garish about Repulsion, and not just in Deneuve’s silent-movie rendition of psychosis: it’s the actual Carnaby Street background to which the Belgian hairdresser she plays has to live up. Though Deneuve is, of course, more beautiful than any of the English girls she encounters, she has that fish out of water inferiority complex that, the new documentary asserts, remains very much the most sanguine part of Polanski’s psychology. She’s our surrogate for him, his exploration of the way he feels about his nomad status.

When he met the ingénue Sharon Tate and they fell in love, it was the beginning of a new life for Polanski. Her murder once again shattered his world, right on the heels of the great success of his New York-based horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The Satanist plot of RB seemed to infect his reputation, and its eerie echoes within Manson’s circle of thrill killing left many recalling the old saw about no smoke without fire. Polanski ping-ponged between high-budget studio films like Chinatown and independent, smaller and kookier pictures like The Tenant (1976) and What? (1972)—and then came the crime that Wanted and Desired hones in on.